Gregory Bateson has argued that the rituals, for instance, that two dogs enact in meeting and greeting each other are not instinctual in the sense of being pre-programmed and automatic. The rituals are rather a matter of the two dogs expressively and intercorporeally determining the situation, and working out a shared world. Animals, Bateson asserts, cannot use negations. They cannot say “I will not bite.” What they do, instead, is they act out a kind of reductio ad absurdum: they play at biting and fighting, for instance, in order to reveal to each other that “it is biting that I am not doing.” In this way, they “discover or rediscover friendship.” Through an intercorporeal dance, they bring to expression a situation in which each is confirmed as the friend of the other.

-- Kym Maclaren, “Life is Inherently Expressive,” Life: the 28th Annual Meeting of the Merleau-Ponty Circle, University of Western Ontario 2003; cited in David Morris, "Animals and humans, thinking and nature," Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences (2005) 4, page 60-1

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